[Digikam-devel] raw speed in gqview

[Arnd Baecker]

Hi,

before using digikam I used gqview
(http://gqview.sourceforge.net/) a lot.
Recent versions have quite a few interesting features,
in particular it can display the jpeg embedded in several
camera raw image formats.
It turns out that this is fast, i.e. noticeably faster than F3 in digikam.
E.g. for EOS 350D .cr2 files it takes digikam
a bit above 2s whereas gqview takes around 1s on my machine.
Moreover, changing back and forth between two images is instantaneous
(so obviously some caching is used for this.)

Don't get me wrong, I really think that digikam is great,
but the comparison with gqview shows (at least on my machine)
that the speed of display of both raw images and also jpg's
can be improved...
(I don't know the internals, but is it maybe
the interfacing with dcraw which eats up time
compared to gqview, which does not seem to make use of dcraw?)

Installation of gqview is straightforward and only takes a few minutes.
Just get
GQview 2.1.4 (development version) and go for
  mkdir /tmp/tst
  ./configure --prefix=/tmp/tst ;  make ; make install
  /tmp/tst/bin/gqview

Best,

Arnd


P.S.: http://bugs.kde.org/ seems down,
      """The connection has timed out. The server at bugs.kde.org
         is taking too long to respond."""
      This occurs to me already for a quite a while,
      and makes BKO unusable for finding out about previous wishes etc.


P.P.S: Other interesting features of gqview are the
       - nice pan-view mode,
           http://gqview.sourceforge.net/progress21.html
         (type  CTRL-J in a folder with many images ...)
       - quite flexible window layout
           http://gqview.sourceforge.net/view-shot.html
       - customization of the exif side-bar
           http://gqview.sourceforge.net/docs/7_1_exif.html
         (I think there was a B.K.O entry on this ....)